New website!April 25, 2015

Now that I'm getting better at web development, I decided that it was time to switch from my old static website to a newer, better, dynamic one. I got everything working in just a couple hours by leveraging a web framework I made called Bowser.

PAX Prime, SeattleSeptember 05, 2014

A few months ago, some friends of mine told me they were going to PAX. I didn't really know what that was, but it seemed to involve video games, so I was in. I had also been considering moving to Seattle, so this was a good chance to see the city.

Friday was exploration day. I spent most of my time walking through the convention center and probably only saw about 20% of what was at PAX. This thing is massive. There are several large rooms which have people playing video games of all kinds. As I walked around, I saw cosplayers dressed in elaborate outfits from League of Legends, Zelda, and many other games.

On Saturday I entered a Magic the Gathering tournament. I wasn’t pleased with the terrible pool of cards that I opened, but I decided to see if I can win a game or two. I beat the girl in the first round even though she tried to play 3 swamps on her first turn. The next round, Soul of Shandalar destroyed me.

Due to spending all this time at the Magic tourney, my friends had already eaten and I was hungry so I headed across the street for an unusual lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. The place was completely full and the hostess informed me that it would be a 30 minute wait. But aha! There was a single table still open near the bar and since I met the 21+ requirements, I was seated immediately.

A girl approaches and asks if she and her friends can join me at my table. I say ‘sure’! Now, my four-seater table actually had four people. I was happy to have people to talk to and they got to get a table quickly. Win win. I don’t think many people would have the guts to do what that girl did. Me especially.

They ordered many rounds of shots and I learned that the guy used to be a security guard at a casino. The not-so-extroverted-girl had recently come back from Japan, where her husband was stationed in the military. And extraverted-girl -- she said a lot, but I don’t really remember anything she said.

* * *

Sunday was the day of Rothfuss. My favorite book in the world is The Name of the Wind, so I was very excited to see the author, Patrick Rothfuss, speak in person. I went to the theatre a couple hours early in order to guarantee a good seat. I figured, even if he wasn’t that interesting to listen to, I could just stare at his amazing beard.

He was hilarious and was probably the best speaker I’ve ever heard. Hmm, maybe it’s not a coincidence that he also wrote my favorite book. He did some Q&A’s – I even asked him the first question. He read some stories. And at the way end, after people kept asking for him to sing, he and everyone in the audience sang “You Are My Sunshine” together. It was amazing.

I played a LOT of board games that weekend. We played the classics that I already enjoyed like Werewolf and Hanabi, but I also discovered some great games for the first time - like Splendor and Coup. I got crushed every time in Splendor, but I’d say it’s the game I’m most looking forward to playing again.

Me

Hello. I'm Jason Mirra and this is my personal site :)

I went to Carnegie Mellon for a couple years, then interned at
Palantir before dropping out to start Addepar.

I code lots of things for fun. Below I've linked to some of the games & projects I've made.

Poker AI

I made a full-ring Texas Hold'em poker AI. It learns from your behavior.
You can play against it by
downloading the JAR.

Map Editor

Java Libraries

I open-sourced the libraries I created to greatly speed up my Java development.

Ox - Contains a wide variety of useful things. Most notably, you can do many IO operations in one line of code.
It provides a better API for dealing with JSON. It has easy logging, config file reading, and much more.
Some of my other libraries depend on this library.

EZDB - Greatly simplifies the code for interacting with a MySQL database.